That would depend on the type of task—for computational tasks a series of planners and solvers do many ‘jobs’ without knowing what it is doing—just minimising a function repeatedly until the right result appears.
They typically aren’t literally trying all combinations though (or if they are, the space of configurations is not too large). In this sense, then, the algorithm does know what it is doing, because it is narrowing down an exponentially large search space to a manageable size.
That would depend on the type of task—for computational tasks a series of planners and solvers do many ‘jobs’ without knowing what it is doing—just minimising a function repeatedly until the right result appears.
They typically aren’t literally trying all combinations though (or if they are, the space of configurations is not too large). In this sense, then, the algorithm does know what it is doing, because it is narrowing down an exponentially large search space to a manageable size.